ACHEULEAN ARTEFACTS AT MAROPENG IN THECRADLE OF HUMANKIND WORLD HERITAGE SITE,GAUTENG PROVINCE, SOUTH AFRICA

摘要

During construction of the new public interpretive centre at Maropeng for Gauteng Province's Cradle of Humankind early hominid sites, Early Pleistocene stone tools were unearthed from deposits now occupied by the marketplace and museum. Sealed between two thick clay-dominated colluvial deposits is a residual lag horizon which bears the artefacts. The tool-bearing layer also formed as colluvial sediment, but it was subsequently eroded, resulting in a pebble-dominated pavement across the site, which was subsequently buried. Artefacts are made on local raw materials available within 200 m of the site of excavation. Although dating of the layer is not possible, the artefacts, retrieved from both controlled excavations and from ground disturbed by the earthworks, are dominated by tool types and technological traits which indicate an earlier Acheulean period of the Stone Age. Elsewhere in the Cradle of Humankind, the early Acheulean is estimated on fauna to date between 1.7 and 1.0 Ma, while in the Vaal River basin in the interior of the country, alluvial sediments with early Acheulean artefacts have been dated with the cosmogenic nuclide burial method to c. 1.7 to 1.3 Ma. Maropeng is now the first evidence of substantial numbers of earlier Acheulean artefacts (at least 1.0 Ma.) to be found in an open-air context within the Cradle of Humankind sites, which comprise cemented infills within underground dolomitic limestone caves. Maropeng's archaeology also has important educational value for the public visiting the interpretive centre.